Jacques Offenbach

Born: 20 June 1819, Cologne, Germany

Died: 5 October 1880, Paris, France

Offenbach – a German-born Jew, like Meyerbeer – was the 19th century’s most popular musical theatre composer – and, like so many popular composers, under-rated. (The people like him, so there must be something wrong with him.)

Offenbach was the Spike Milligan and Monty Python of music. His operas are clever and brilliantly funny. Jupiter tries to seduce a mortal disguised as a fly. The soprano sings a delirious waltz while cannibals cook her alive. He invented the dismembered knight a century before Holy Grail. Choristers sing in authentic Chinese gibberish, or get roaring drunk.

He was also one of music’s great melodists, and was aptly named “the Mozart of the Champs-Elysées”. Offenbach saw himself as continuing the French 18th century comic opera tradition, “le genre primitif et gai” – unlike the Opéra-Comique, which put on small grand opéras.

In 1855, he founded the Bouffes-Parisiens, which was at first limited to pantomimes and operettas with only four characters.

“In an opera which lasts only three quarters of an hour, in which only four characters are allowed and an orchestra of at most 30 persons is employed, we must have ideas and tunes that are as genuine as hard cash (de la mélodie argent comptant).”

Later, with Mesdames de la Halle (1858), he was able to add a chorus and as many characters as he liked.

His major works – including Orphée aux enfers, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, Les brigands, La Périchole, La vie parisienne, La belle Hélène, and Les contes d’Hoffmann – are bigger operas, in two or three acts, and the ancestor of Gilbert and Sullivan.